Lightroom Presets – Fall Colors

This week I’m updating my Fall Color presets. I was talking to my brother yesterday (who lives in the Northeast US) and he was saying how a lot of the leaves are changing color. Now, when I grew up, my dad was absolutely meticulous about our backyard, so the fall season only reminds me of many days of raking leaves after school – not pretty colors. But as an adult I can appreciate the season more (especially since I live in Florida and don’t have to worry about leaves anymore)

Anyway, I do like to photograph the northeast and I realized, as I was going through my photos from the area, that I was making some of the same tweaks to many of my “fall color” photos, so I made a preset for it. Here’s a quick before and after so you can get an idea how it looks:

Here’s the link to download the presets for Lightroom 4 (I made them for LR4. You can try them in LR3 but they’re tuned for LR4 specifically).

Matt is the full-time Director of Education for Kelby Media Group and a Tampa-based photographer. He's the Editor-in-Chief of Lightroom Magazine, the lead instructor on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom LIVE Seminar Tour and author of several best-selling Photoshop books. Matt also hosts the world's top Lightroom blog, LightroomKillerTips.com, where he's built up a massive library of Lightroom videos, presets and tips. In addition to teaching Photoshop, Lightroom and photography seminars around the world, he's an instructor at Photoshop World and one of the full-time staff writers for Photoshop User Magazine.

13 Comments

I realize that I need to upgrade to LR 4, but I am still learning LR3.4. Last time I ran an update I lost all of the locations of my photos and it was a huge nightmare. Not sure how to move on this one.

Also, is there a font chart that shows what the font styles are. Using it to use a watermark and spending huge amount of time looking…..Is there an easier way?

I do have shot fall colors in the past and would love to do the same to my photos as some of these are not that vibrant and just seem to be in need of the finish you have given to your photos. Unfortunately I’m still working with Apples Aperture and wondering about the steps you have made to get the more natural look!?

Thanks for the presets! I have a question about RAW handling in Lightroom. How can I get the preset that I had set in the camera? It seems when I view an image in lightroom, that it had my picturecontrolls from my camera settings (vivid and sharp) then when I bring up loop view that the preset displays for a second then goes away and I get the bla Adobe preset. The JPEG that I shot with the NEF of course looks fine. Are these Nikon proprietary and you can only get them in NX2? Your presets help but I often shoot many kinds of photos on a card and I have my U1/U2 settings set for different picture controls.

Yup. That’s because you shot in raw so LR and ACR will always give you the “Raw” file with no adjustments. If you shoot in JPEG then the camera will “bake” those settings in, but not in raw.
The alternative is to go to the Calibration panel and choose the Profile that matches the one you used in Camera. I even have some presets you can download that will let you apply those on import so you don’t have to go thru adding them to each photo manually.

Matt, thanks for the awesome websites and help. For fear of sounding like the typical ‘looking the gift horse in the mouth’, as a relative Lr newcomer, i would find it very helpful/interesting if you made a few comments and what particular adjustments you used to accomplish your presets. I only say this b/c you recently asked for preset ideas. So my idea is not exactly for new presets, but a little explanation of how you accomplished the ones you’ve done. I think this would make us better Lr users. Also, on today’s fall presets, it looks like the pine tree in the middle gained a few feet. Were you able to accomplish that in Lr, or is that a Photoshop thing? Thank you, Don

Hi Don. I was waiting for some one to notice that. Right before I saved the “After” image I saw some telephone wires and just dead tree branches that I couldn’t resist retouching out. That would be one really cool LR preset though wouldn’t it?

What method did you use to remove the dead tree and phone pole and line? I’ve got a photo of a double rainbow with some power lines in the trees (autumn color), but when I use the clone brush with content aware on it gives me a smeared look. I also tried using the content aware fill method, but got weird results. Any help would be appreciated.

I used the Spot Healing Brush with the Content Aware option turned on. There’s a lot of detail in there that all looks the same so it’s a perfect photo for it.
You may have to resort to the Clone tool with no content aware though.